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Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Napster is doing quite well on its own terms, as it announces a 53% increase in subscribers to its Napster To Go download service. That's the one called Napster To Go because if your subscription lapses, all the music you've paid to download goes, kind of if those book clubs came and took back the books you've already bought if you reject its Book of the Month choice.

Napster now has 410,000 subscribers, which is up 143,000 on the three months prior. So that's adding at a rate of less than 40,000 a month, which doesn't seem that impressive to us. Added to which, 56,000 of those are university students, many of whom are being bounced into subscribing to Napster by colleges petrified of the RIAA and certainly not representing good long-term customers.